Eventbrite Beefs Up Engineering To Take on Ticketmaster

Eventbrite has been busy hiring a bunch of new and notable engineering talent of late to create what they hope will become a true platform for event discovery.

The company just crossed the 200-million-tickets-sold mark and reaped over $1 billion in sales in 2013 alone. The company also rolled out advanced reserved seating charts last March in order to add seated concerts and sporting events.

Overall ticket sales on Eventbrite have grown nearly 300 percent in just the past month, according to the company. The free events are a big driver of Eventbrite’s business. The number one driver of new organizers are previous attendees who got inspired to do their own event, according to the company.

The company most recently brought in April Chang from PayPal as a new VP of Engineering, Consumer & Infrastructure Operations, Danny Greenfield, author of Two Scoops of Django, as well as co-creator of the Django framework, Simon Willison.

Chang’s vision for the revamp is to own the event space and make it more of an event suggestion marketplace.

One possible scenario here is going to the site or on mobile and seeing that a few of your friends are already at an event in real time that you would not have known was happening in your area otherwise, then being able to immediately purchase tickets and attend.

Eventbrite co-founders Kevin and Julia HartZ say the reason for the new focus is a previous indication that a marketplace was already inevitably being created. Over 1 million people come to the site to buy tickets each week, and over half of them end up returning to the site once again to sign up for more events.

The Eventbrite events marketplace will further facilitate people already coming back and looking for more stuff to do. Eventbrite believes positioning themselves as a go-to site for event discovery, in addition to social integration and the wide inventory of events on the company’s platform positions them well as an events platform, beyond mere planning and organizing.

Chang, who was specifically hired to build out this marketplace for both web and mobile, confirms that incorporation of the new marketplace discovery model will happen over time.